Sometimes Bad Design is what the Client Wants
Author of this post: Jen Huls | About Blog Authors »
There will come a time when a client hires you and they request a design that is less than “aesthetically pleasing.” Part of the business of web design is doing something you wouldn’t normally do. I have sites that I could include in my portfolio but choose not to because they’re poorly designed by request of the client and it’s my option to not show the site. Unfortunately, we can only guide a client so far but ultimately it comes down to doing what it is they want. Of course you have options—you could give the client their deposit back and say no thanks or you can suck it up and do what they want.
When you face a project like this you can try to sneak good design in and see if it gets past the client but more often than not they’ll see that the good design sticks out like a sore thumb and shoot it down. This type of project can be a frustrating and unrewarding project to work on but sometimes, especially in the beginning of one’s career, there isn’t much you can do about it. A good thing to keep in mind when these projects come along is that we all end up doing things in our professional career that we look back on and snicker about.
March 24th, 2007 at 8:48 pm
This happens to me more often than not. So, when not at the beginning of our careers, when we are able to turn away business, but we’ve taken on a project, and it turns out the client wants animated gifs, 6 different fonts, a no-text home page and white on black text to sell to the elderly, how do you suggest getting out of the project without causing a PR nightmare? Any diplomatic suggestions?
March 25th, 2007 at 12:53 pm
One of the things I’ve learned in my career as a web designer is that a good designer knows how to educate the client, and sell them on a good idea. We have to remember that we’re not just designers, but marketers. We also have an ethical responsibility to not create web sites that are going to hurt the client’s business, even if they want us to. Designers should be up front with clients and let them know that what they want to do (ie. a bad design) will actually hurt their business. Sometimes you have to throw in a statistic or two, but with a little skill, it can be done. If the client is really so hard-headed that they won’t listen to your professional advice, then it’s time to fire the client. :)
March 25th, 2007 at 6:02 pm
I totally agree with WebGeek. Though I do not do web design, only static, I have the same issues and concerns as you do. Unfortunately, I cannot fire the client as I am employed. However, I do let them know in no uncertain terms, that good design can only help them whereas bad, the opposite.
My biggest problem is never being allowed to create the dark side of a message for shock and curiosity. I am always constricted to the obvious.
What do you guys think about such messages? Do tag lines of shock make readers turn the page, and if so, buy the product as often as the obvious message?
March 26th, 2007 at 9:56 pm
I agree that we need to educate the client, but the problem is this statement, “Beauty is in the eye of the beholder”. It is difficult to educate someone who thinks an ugly design is beautiful.
I just had a client fire me for advising them to have static html text on their homepage for SEO reasons, but they wanted a complete flash site. I told them I would do it but they would not be happy with the results. Now they hired someone that built the entire site in flash. It’s a small real estate business that will now have a very hard time ranking well in search engines. But I did my part and educated them. Sometimes its easier to just disagree and part ways, then make it a tense relationship throughout the project.
March 27th, 2007 at 12:40 am
I’m not a designer but a copywriter, and man… times are tough all over. I’ve dealt with clients who insisted on concepts and headlines ranging from the forgettably bland to the staggeringly offensive, and my advice echoes what others have said here: suck it up when you have to, but realize how rare it is that you *really* have to. If you fight the good fight, keep your patience and always come back to finding a way that the two of you can agree and get something good produced, you’ll find fewer and fewer of those instances where all is truly lost and you have to drop the project and back away. Educating the client is good, but realize that this means learning from *them*, too. I’ve wasted a lot of time in my career crafting ways of getting good work “past” my clients, when really what would have worked better — what’s been shown to work again and again — is a (and I hate this word) collaboration, where each party contributes and operates in an environment of (I hate this phrase, too, but it’s necessary) mutual respect.
If you wait until you’re famous and successful enough that you can deliver brilliance on a silver platter and have the client grovel with gratitude, you’ll be waiting a long time. And if you act like that’s the arrangement you want, you may *never* get there at all.
March 27th, 2007 at 4:40 pm
I agree with WebGeek and others: statistics can be a great thing to show the client when it’s a question of, say, including some static text that will help their search engine ranking. As far as steering clients away from cheesy or hackneyed design ideas, I also find that showing the client good design examples from their direct competitors can help them see why you’re trying to keep them to a certain standard, trying to set them apart, trying to match a certain level of credibility against possibly more established competitors.
April 3rd, 2007 at 10:40 am
I cannot completely agree with this view, although it would be foolish to not acknowledge the reality of such projects. This is where I have to agree with webgeek. It is a huge challenge for designers to educate clients about design and its benefits. Sadly, it doesn’t happen as often as it should. We usually face two challenges; 1. clients do not understand design or misunderstand it 2. Designers fail to articulate in much needed clarity, their ideas to the audience and most importantly the design process. Point 2 can be tackled by taking clients through research, including them in brainstorming sessions, showcasing sketches of all ideas, interaction concepts and models, mood boards, the construction of design, etc. If this aspect of client interaction is taken care of well, then it would far easier to surpass the challenge of convincing clients into good design and set benchmarks within the provided boundary, both for clients and designers.
July 25th, 2007 at 12:37 am
I recently worked with a client who wanted a tremendous amount of content on her organization’s homepage. I talked her out of some of it, but that still left a lot, and so I did my best to fit it all and make the page readable. She approved the design (said she loved it, even!) and I thought, well, it’s not my best design but it will be essentially usable so let’s go with it, and I began the process of building it out. Then, a couple weeks later, I hear from someone else in her organization. The woman has left, and the others on the board want to reassess the design. Turns out they hate it. We met this morning, and this IT manager who’s a volunteer board member goes about insulting every single aspect of the design, treating me like I know nothing, and introducing his own ideas, which (surprise) are just as bad as those of the woman who preceded him. He’s essentially pushing the design in the direction of brochureware, while thinking he’s So Hip. He talks about social networking, but then stresses over and over that the homepage should have a huge photo in the middle, with navigation over it and repeated underneath it. Not that I couldn’t make that work, but it’ll be a challenge-and-a-half to keep it from looking like vintage 90’s brochureware. The worst part of it, for me, was sitting through this humiliating meeting with everyone looking to him as the expert (being an IT guy, afterall) while he slammed everything I’d done, and then, to top it off, my own colleague in our IT dept volunteered that he hated the design too. I couldn’t really defend it, but nor did I agree with their ideas! Makes me think I should never again do what the client wants…. :-(
July 25th, 2007 at 9:20 pm
Hey all, thanks for the fabulous comments on this post. I’m sorry I’ve been lax in responding, it’s been a busy summer. I have to agree with most of the viewpoints expressed here. One of the unfortunate realities of any design process is “collaborating” with the client and sometimes the reality of that is giving them something we may know will not work for them. I’m a fan of “fire the client” because at this point I just refuse to be party to putting more bad design on the Internet. The problem is, there are still designer’s out there that don’t follow this creed. They will do whatever the client wants at whatever skill level they are at—it’s sometimes a two way street.
I agree with WebGeek and chandrasekhar K about it being part of our job to educate the client but again, reality can be harsh. Sometimes the client doesn’t want to be educated, they feel they know what’s better for their business than we do. How far you want to take that battle is up to each individual.
@ Defeated:
I’ve worked in similar situations as your current one. Of course, I’ve never been one to be too diplomatic and often end up eating shoe leather. At one of my jobs this would happen a lot, people who knew very little about design/usability dictated the direction of design, so every project was a battle to do what I knew was right for the end-user and giving the “client” what they wanted. As far as hearing that your design wasn’t up to par, you’ll need to get used to that. I’ve been in plenty of meetings where I designed as directed and had them torn apart and what I did in that situation was usually took previous rejected designs with me to show them the options they were given originally. Makes my ego feel a little better and gives the “client” more options without sitting there looking like you don’t know what you’re doing.
October 22nd, 2007 at 8:34 am
The end user of all software and web developments are the customers. Even if you consider those to be the people in the department next door, they are the people who drive our work. Ultimately, it’s our job to deliver what they want, not we what we want or we think is the best. Sometimes that’s a tough fact to face.
December 1st, 2008 at 2:23 pm
Thanks. I really needed this today when I discovered that animated gifs are not dead and that a client really wants one for a logo. Kill me now.
May 25th, 2009 at 8:03 am
Im currently working with one of these clients. Spent a large amount of time on initial mockups, he chose to alter to include his awful stock photography, worse, next came comic sans, then the gifs…I just try and turn my brain off on such projects…
…its makes it all worthwhile when somebody does come along whos willing to have a good site
God bless you wonderful clients